Question of the Month

This past month we received a note from one of our subscribers who has considerable experience doing search engine work for her own company, as well as several outside clients. She also is known to have a very good reputation, as well as a high success rate. Recently, after having experienced a slipping in the relevancy ratings, she adapted a handful of pages to meet with Infoseek's recent stringent changes (as per the guidelines she received though our publication).

In her own words she explained,

I had done this for one of our clients a few days earlier, submitted their pages and placed very well, often number one. I submitted (my company's) pages one at a time but only did three of them since something seemed wrong. Over several hours when I tried to use Infoseek's "check on URL" link, it continued to show that submission was in process (it was not evening or a weekend).

At the end of the day I got an email from Infoseek saying that our recently submitted pages violated their rules and our domain had been blocked from submitting. What really got me was that I had just redone the pages to meet the newer standards -- and yet they claim I had violated them instead. I wrote to Infoseek for an explanation and received a form reply with a list of disallowed items, at least one of which must have been contained in my pages.

Here is a copy of InfoSeek's message.

Dear Webmistress,

These pages have been removed and blocked from our index due...